Technology company Demcon from Best has developed and delivered a fully functioning respirator within a month. The system meets all requirements and can be used to ventilate corona patients.
The ventilation system will be distributed to hospitals by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. Soon, Demcon will deliver a total of 500 ventilation systems. "The government has had the guts to place an order for 500 with us. Because we already had a lot of knowledge and experience with ventilation technology and modules, but we had never delivered a complete ventilation system before," said Demcon CEO Dennis Schipper in a press release on the website. "Our employees, with all their efforts and sometimes working day and night, have lived up to that trust. I am happy that we can contribute in this way to the great challenge of the moment, the optimal treatment of patients. This is in our DNA, using technological know-how to solve social issues."
The DemcAir ventilation system is based on the unique ventilation technology previously developed by Demcon and can be used for all kinds of patients, from premature babies to adults. The separate ventilation modules have been in production at Demcon for many years. So now, in addition to those modules, Demcon has developed a full-fledged ventilation system, in the Netherlands, for the treatment of (young) adults. On Thursday 19 March, Demcon started preparations and on Sunday 22 March the order came from the ministry for the delivery of 500 units. After successful clinical tests on several patients, the first units have now been delivered - within a month.
Medical product development
One month, that's pretty short. Schipper: "Even though we had the ventilation module available and built the complete system as simply as possible, it is and remains complex. Such a ventilation system is vital for ICU care, must be 100% safe for the patient and easy to operate by the doctors and nurses. We therefore paid a lot of attention to safety and ease of operation and tested it carefully. In doing so, we were able to build on the experience we have gained over the past ten years."
National expert group
Demcon is not the first company in the Netherlands to use its expertise and production line to develop close-to-home products for healthcare in the Netherlands. Several manufacturing companies previously went to work on such products as mouth caps, protective aprons and respirators. That speed is nice and also necessary, but care is also important, says Lieke Poot in the same press release on Demcon's website. Poot is a clinical physicist at the Isala hospitals in the Zwolle region and president of the Dutch Society for Clinical Physics - clinical physicists are responsible for the reliability and safety of medical equipment in hospitals. Poot is also a member of the national expert group on ventilation equipment at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. "The expert group identifies which devices from outside hospitals are suitable for intensive care, assesses offers from existing suppliers and guides manufacturing initiatives. Lots of smart people and companies want to help and are coming up with inventive ideas. It is great to see that everyone is in solution mode. This does involve life-support equipment, so as an expert group we have to see if something works well and contributes to patient treatment. Demcon has a lot of experience with the mechanical part, the ventilation module that has been in practice for years. We were confident that they could build an enclosure and software around that in a short time."
A manufacturing process for a medical device can normally take up to a year or more, explains Poot. "Now we follow a kind of pressure cooker procedure, in which we cannot fully follow the applicable laws and regulations, while we have to arrive at a functional and safe product. We designed that procedure as we went along, in intensive cooperation with Demcon. We are very transparent on both sides and, at our request, they allowed Dekra (the certification body, ed.) to observe the drafting of the technical documentation and the risk management. Everyone sees the importance, this way we can realise things that normally cannot be realised in such a short time."
Suppliers
The DemcAir ventilation system came about thanks to intensive collaborations, Schipper stresses. "To start with, within our company between numerous colleagues spread across different locations. And we have short lines of communication with the National Resource Consortium and the expert group. " Suppliers also did their best to deliver essential components and submodules on time. Demcon's complete system, including the central module, contains more than 200 different components. They come from Allied Motion, SPIE, VDL, 2E Interconnection, Hoerbiger, tbp electronics and CE Compressed Air Technology, among others.
Source: Demcon.
